Google’s Data Studio quietly adds data export functionality

There have been some good updates to Google Data Studio in recent months, with Google’s data visualisation platform being enhanced for the better with some extended functionality.

We’ve had some fun with Data Studio over the last year; it is a great way to quickly visualise data from multiple sources and can be a time saver in analysis. But something was missing: the ability to export data!

This has been rectified in a recent update with the ability to export charts and tables into CSV format. This means you can now set up a dashboard report as you want it to look and take that data down into Excel for additional analysis via the various API connections to Data Studio.

So how does it work? When viewing a dashboard hovering over charts and tables a new menu button appears. Once clicked, it opens the Export to CSV functionality. Clicking one of these items tells Data Studio to fetch the data shown in the chart/table and is then downloaded.

This functionality helps Google Data Studio move from pure data visualisation to data management and in turn helps to make reporting easier, more programmatic, and more transparent. Overall this is another positive step for the tool, with many recent updates moving it forward, such as:

• Search Console connectors were added in February to add to the Analytics and AdWords connectors already available giving marketers more options to link to their data sources and visualise it all in one place.
• TV and letterhead modes were also added to help reports be available for presentation in both soft and hard copy format.

Also, the five-report limit was removed meaning finally we can create as many reports as required. This ultimately makes Data Studio a more versatile and useful tool that can be used in many situations around the workplace to aid data-driven marketing.

Google Data Studio is now available in more than 180 countries and we hope the team continues its support and positive updates to bring together the full Google Analytics 360 Suite. You can try it out at datastudio.google.com.